In the survival phase, new teachers begin to realize the realities of day-to-day work. Teachers in this phase have little time for planning or reflection—they simply struggle to stay afloat. Even in the face of challenges and difficulties, most beginning teachers attempt to maintain their energy and dedication to students, though they may find themselves falling short. This phase often occurs around the second to third month of school.
New teachers often “hit the wall” during the disillusionment phase. At this time, they may begin to question their commitment, capability, and self-worth, and they sometimes even become ill from stress. The disillusionment phase often presents the greatest challenge for the first-year teacher to overcome and typically falls between November and January.
Source: Republished with permission of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, from “The Stages of a Teacher’s First Year,” Moir, 1999, p. 21; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
Figure 1.2: The phases of a first-year teacher’s attitude toward teaching.
The next phase—rejuvenation—often arrives shortly after winter break, once new teachers have had the opportunity to rest and spend time with family and friends. Time away from the stresses and pressures of the classroom can give beginning teachers a new outlook on their profession and a new sense of their own accomplishments. Teachers in this phase feel more hopeful and begin to focus on their students’ academic performance and their own teaching competence. Rejuvenation can last into the spring.
As the school year comes to a close, new teachers enter the reflection phase. In this phase, they look back on all they have learned throughout the year, including which strategies were effective, which strategies were ineffective, which strategies went untried, and what they could do differently next year. At the end of the year, many teachers also feel powerful emotions related to saying good-bye to their first group of students.
As they close out the school year, beginning teachers typically re-enter the anticipation phase. During this time, they begin to think ahead to the following year. Having had the opportunity to reflect, beginning teachers usually feel ready to enter the next school year with new ideas, streamlined procedures, and different strategies to try out in the classroom.
As the first few stressful phases in Moir’s (1999) model illustrate, beginning educators face a steep learning curve. School leaders, parents, and students normally expect significant growth from new teachers within a very short period of time. As Breaux and Wong (2003) pointed out, new teachers are expected to develop an understanding of the school culture, form relationships with their students and colleagues, and find balance between work and personal life within a few short months. Further, beginning teachers are expected to be completely prepared to begin teaching on the first day of school and to improve their performance each and every year thereafter. Ellen Moir, Dara Barlin, Janet Gless, and Jan Miles (2009) noted that “regardless of the quality or duration of the teacher preparation program, new teachers assume the full range of teacher responsibilities only on the first day on the job” (p. 58). Because the first day of school brings unexpected challenges, “everything before that might be considered a simulation” (p. 58).
For many of the tasks that teachers perform daily in the classroom, expertise develops over time as practitioners gain exposure to a wide variety of classroom occurrences. David C. Berliner (1988) identified the following six dimensions in which expert teachers perform more adeptly than novices.
1. Interpreting classroom phenomena
2. Discerning important events
3. Using routines
4. Making predictions
5. Distinguishing between typical and atypical events
6. Evaluating performance
According to Berliner (2000), anecdotal reports from teachers indicate that developing skills in these dimensions requires three to five years of experience. Berliner (1994) also asserted that beginning teachers require five years to move from the novice stage of teacher development to the competent stage.
Despite these differences between beginning and experienced teachers, school leaders often expect new teachers to immediately perform the same—or similar—tasks and duties as teachers with years of experience but with relatively little support. This expectation does a tremendous disservice to new teachers. Skills that appear simple and automatic for experienced teachers are often the result of years of careful practice, work, and reflection.
Deliberate Practice to Develop Expertise
While most professionals maintain average levels of performance once they reach them, some continue to improve their craft and eventually reach “the highest levels of professional mastery,” or expertise (Ericsson, 2006, p. 683). While extensive experience is necessary for achieving expertise, experience alone does not “invariably lead to expert levels of achievement” (p. 683). Rather, reaching the highest levels of performance requires deliberate practice, or a concentrated effort to improve one’s abilities (Colvin, 2008; Ericsson, 2006).
When people think about practicing a skill, they typically think of repeating an action over and over again until it becomes automatic. For instance, a teenager preparing for a driving test might drive so frequently that the various elements of operating a vehicle become second nature. Similarly, a basketball player might shoot fifty layups every day until he or she develops muscle memory to make the skill automatic. People who engage in deliberate practice, on the other hand, try to avoid automaticity because they want to correct errors at finer and finer levels of detail. During each practice session, they identify problems with their technique and work to correct them, always seeking to attain a higher level of mastery.
Because deliberate practice requires the practitioner to identify specific areas in which he or she needs improvement, the process of cultivating expertise is nearly impossible to undertake independently. Geoff Colvin (2008) explained:
Without a clear, unbiased view of the subject’s performance, choosing the best practice activity will be impossible…. Very few of us can make a clear, honest assessment of our own performance. Even if we could, we could not design the best practice activity for that moment in our development—the type of practice that would put us on the road to achieving at the highest levels—unless we had extensive knowledge of the latest and best methods for developing people in our chosen field. Most of us don’t have that knowledge. (pp. 67–68)
In order to achieve success in the classroom, new teachers must develop expertise. However, they cannot do this alone. Beginning teachers can only reasonably be expected to succeed if they receive intentional, comprehensive support catered to meet their unique needs. We suggest that mentors can effectively provide this support.
The Importance of Support and Mentoring
The use of mentoring to help new employees develop expertise is not specific to the teaching profession. In fact, the most employee-friendly corporations in the United States emphasize mentoring and training. Every year, Fortune magazine partners with the Great Place to Work Institute to conduct an extensive survey of employees at different American companies (such as Google, Goldman Sachs, and Whole Foods). The survey includes questions about employees’ attitudes toward management credibility, job satisfaction, camaraderie, pay and benefit programs, hiring, communication, and diversity. Fortune then uses the results to publish an annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” In 2014, salaried employees of the companies on this list received an average of seventy-five hours of training per year, with some companies on the list offering hundreds of hours of training annually (Fortune, 2014).
Unlike these companies, school systems